 I've chosen an unusual paper for my next journal club discussion, it's a sociological study inspired by Q Dragon's recent response to the Discovery Institute. The DI are asserting that there is a strong atheist bias among biologists, and that this bias creates an atmosphere hostile to theists, who account for only 10% of biology professors. I think this is wrong on several levels, and I want to present this survey data in support of why I think so. The title is The Religiosity of American College and University Professors. The authors are sociologists from George Mason University and the University of British Columbia, and it presents an analysis of a 2006 survey of professors from across the United States. I'm going to skip on the usual areas of the paper, such as abstract and introduction, and I'm going to only briefly describe the methods, because the interesting points here are in the results or data section, and the authors conclusions. The survey subjects were selected using existing databases of degree-granting institutions, where one professor from each category of study was selected at each institution. The data were stratified to include both elite and non-elite education settings from Harvard and MIT to community colleges. Elite status was determined by the US News and World Report rankings. School and law schools were excluded, as the purpose was to focus on undergraduate degree-granting institutions. This will obviously exclude the bulk of medical researchers who work in research institutions rather than at four-year undergrad institutions. The response rate was 51%, which is excellent for this type of survey, and the total number of cases used is 1,417. They randomly conducted phone surveys with 100 non-responders to determine if there was any bias in responders. Here are the results. Table 1 is a belief in God survey. The selection of responses was different from studies I've seen in the past, but strong atheists account for 9.8%. Agnostic atheists account for another 13.1%, and an interesting 19.2% believe in a higher power, which could include pantheists and other groups that classically don't believe in a personal God. A good 51.5% of professors do believe in God, though, even if they admit to some doubt. Table 2 is interesting, as it breaks out Table 1 by disciplinary field. The most godless groups are psychology and mechanical engineers by far, and the most religious are in finance, accounting, and elementary education. I'll leave it up to you to pour over the data. I want to move on to Table 4, which compares religious orientation by institution type and by discipline. Note that the non-elite doctoral degree-granting schools actually had the highest non-religious responses, and the elite institutions show a broad distribution of different views. In the disciplines, experimental sciences show the highest non-religious rates, but the social sciences and humanities have similar numbers. Only the health fields show a substantial proportion of traditional religious views. Table 5 shows that the largest religious affiliation of professors is none, with 31.2% claiming no particular group, 15.9% are Catholic, followed by the usual slew of different flavors of Christian or Jewish, and a few Buddhists, Muslims, and Hindus thrown in. I'm willing to bet that this same result would not be obtained if medical schools or research institutions were included in the survey, where Hindus and Buddhists who are very heavily represented. Table 6 are regression coefficients between a variable and a survey result. Negative values here represent an inverse relationship, positives a direct relationship. Stars indicate significant correlations. For example, if you have a PhD, you are significantly less likely to claim a religious affiliation. If you are married, you are more likely to attend church, but if you are white, you are less likely. If you're from the northeast or west, you are less likely to accept the literal truth of the Bible. And if you are a researcher of any kind, you are very, very likely not to hold traditional religious views. I leave it to you to read the full conclusions of the authors. I've chosen just a few of my favorites. But the hypothesis that the university is a secular institution because of the irreligious tendencies of the faculty does not withstand empirical scrutiny. It is a secular institution despite the fact that most of its key personnel are themselves religious believers. Here's another great one. In light of our findings, one such mechanism that might be hypothesized to exist, that students become more secular as their atheist professors call into question the value of religion seems implausible as a broad generalization. If anything, our finding that the most secular professors are those focused primarily on research, a minority of all professors, would suggest that the bulk of the teaching function in American colleges and universities is being carried out by academics who are personally sympathetic to religion, albeit not in its most traditional forms. So the old narrative about the evil atheist professor corrupting the youth of America into godless socialist intellectualism isn't well supported by the demographic survey data. Most professors are religious just not to the same degree or in the same way as America as a whole. Married professors are significantly more likely to regularly attend church and professors of applied health like nursing or business professors are also more likely to be traditionally religious while professors with a doctoral level degree are less likely to be religious. In just the elite institutions, only 1% of professors describe themselves as born-again Christians while 13% describe themselves as Jewish, which is the opposite trend at non-elite institutions like community colleges where born-again Christians may represent up to a quarter of the professors. Only 5.7% of all responders were biblical literalists. 39.5% believed the Bible to be divinely inspired, with 48.3% believing the Bible to be an ancient book of fables, legends, history, and moral precepts. It's true that researchers and physical science professors who rely heavily on empirical data and evidence in their daily work are a bit less likely to be accepting of a faith-based religious belief and much less likely to accept biblical accounts as literally true. If the Discovery Institute believes that studying biology and the modern evolutionary synthesis automatically leads to atheism, I think they need to explain what about studying psychology or sociology or even engineering leads people down that same path. The data really suggests that the higher echelons of learning and education are inherently less religious, or at least less traditionally religious. I'm sure that's not the narrative they want. Fortunately for them, they show an amazing ability to live in their own imagined reality rather than the world you or I actually inhabit. Thanks for watching.